The Government runs on a different calendar than most of us and has a fiscal year that ends in September. This evolved since the founding for various reasons. That means that we are approaching the end of this fiscal year and about to start a new one.
This creates a number of issues since we are a deficit country that has to borrow to continue operating. Also, legally all our funding bills (or at least most) end with the fiscal year and new ones have to be approved or we need a temporary spending bill.
Second, related a bit to the first but also different is our debt ceiling. We can't borrow above our debt ceiling which we will exceed it seems in October. The money we bring in from various taxes is no way enough to actually operate the Government so if we can't borrow we have to stop certain activities.
While failure to pay our obligations would a disaster to the world economic systems and to our people as cuts would be made.
It has become somewhat common that these two events get tied up in political end games. Of course the long term solution would be to increase income or reduce expenditures. Since many expenditures are tied up in entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare or Veterans among others, reducing them is both difficult and painful.
Increasing income on the other hand is called raising taxes which Americans generally dislike in principle. Of course taxing the rich sounds OK until it turns out you may be richer than you thought you were.
It would be nice if we could agree in a bipartisan way on a long term solution.
It would be nice but not likely.
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